Winifred Hughes

Architecture Student

Given latitude and map,

she fixes Venice for her site plan,
conjures up a floating opera

housemid-canal: anchorless,
flung against no sky,

its matchbox chambers a spatial music.
The professor wants a “story,”

persuasiveness of line, meta-geometry
not lived-in storeys,cracked plaster,

gutters and plumbing:
it doesn’t have to holdwater,

just hover over the mind’s grid.
You have to learn, he says,

how to play, how not to fasten things
with bolts and mortar,

design no place to be

but to imagine being.